San Diego Supercomputer Center

What we do

Since opening its doors in the fall of 1985 as one of the nation’s first federally funded supercomputer centers, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, has enabled science and engineering discoveries through advances in computational science and high-performance computing.

Managing and extracting value from what is called ‘Big Data’ is another area of expertise at SDSC. By designing, developing, providing, supporting and educating students and researchers about data cyberinfrastructure, SDSC serves acts as a strategic resource to science, industry, government, and academia. SDSC offers expertise and solutions in the areas of bioinformatics, geoinformatics, scientific workflows, and HIPAA- and FISMA- compliant services for sensitive information such as medical records.

The Center’s supercomputing resources include Comet, a petascale supercomputer designed to transform advanced scientific computing by expanding access and capacity among traditional as well as non-traditional research domains. SDSC is also home to Gordon, an innovative computing platform designed by SDSC engineers with flash-based memory to speed solutions for data-intensive problems.

SDSC also provides remotely-accessible data storage, as well as high-speed networking and data-transfer services.

A Key Provider of Integrated Digital Infrastructure (IDI)

SDSC provides several components of the Integrated Digital Infrastructure (IDI) program, a set of campus-oriented research support services. Through SDSC, UC San Diego's IDI program provides high-performance research infrastructure in several key areas:

Supercomputing, through the Triton Shared Computing Cluster

Large-scale disk storage, through the parallel Data Oasis filesystem

Colocation of hardware in an energy-efficient, year-round managed data center

UC San Diego researchers can learn more about IDI by visiting the program website.

A LEED-Certified Data Center

SDSC’s “green” data center houses collocation servers for UC San Diego and UC researchers and academic units. The 5,000 square-foot data center, which augments the Center’s previous 13,000 square-foot data center, contains the latest energy-efficient technologies and is managed by a staff of professionals on a 24-7 basis.

A Powerhouse of Cyberinfrastructure

To meet the needs of UC San Diego researchers, SDSC provides an integrated set of hardware, software, and user services, including:

An internationally renowned environment for data management, mining, curation, analysis, visualization, access and preservation, as well as leadership-class storage technologies

A broad spectrum of software tools, portals, workbenches, and packages integrated to enable researchers to develop and deploy complex applications

Professional user services that allow researchers to take full advantage of highly advanced, world-class hardware, software, and information resources

A range of collaboration programs for working with partners on strategic and community applications, data collections, and projects

An industry-leading cyberinfrastructure laboratory that provides an environment for the design, development, and testing of software and hardware systems at scale

A computational and storage infrastructure for community data collections

Collaborations & Partnerships

SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT. SDSC is a leading member of the National Science Foundation-funded XSEDE project, helping scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists use advanced digital resources and services such as supercomputers, and software applications, and other new tools critical to the success of their research.

In addition to a wide range of collaborations with UC San Diego researchers, SDSC also has a wide-ranging program called UC@SDSC, which fosters partnerships across numerous science domains with other UC researchers.

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Staff

With a staff of more than 200 scientists, software developers, and support personnel, SDSC is an international leader in advanced computation and data management, while offering expertise to assist and advance research in the biosciences, geosciences, social sciences, and more.

Technical User Support

All researchers with access to SDSC’s resources are supported by SDSC’s consulting staff. Contact SDSC Consulting for technical support on SDSC’s systems and resources. For more information visit the SDSC website.